[Edaily Reporter Lee So-Hyun ] Kakao(035720)Kakao has achieved its highest-ever quarterly revenue and operating profit, driven by the simultaneous growth of KakaoTalk’s advertising and commerce segments, as well as its payment and mobility services. By strengthening its profit base through the recovery of high-margin platform businesses and the divestment of non-core operations, the company has also secured the financial capacity to expand its KakaoTalk-based agentic artificial intelligence (AI).

Building on this, Kakao is partnering with Coupang Eats to launch its first agentic AI transaction service, which enables users to go from menu recommendations to ordering and payment directly within KakaoTalk chats. The company plans to channel revenue generated from existing businesses, such as advertising and commerce, into AI investments and begin full-scale monetization through transaction fees, subscriptions, and advertising starting next year.

TalkBiz and Pay Grow in Tandem… Boosting Profitability

Kakao announced on the 6th that it recorded consolidated revenue of 2.0985 trillion won and operating profit of 277 billion won for the second quarter of 2026. These figures represent year-over-year increases of 9% and 36%, respectively, and are both record highs on a quarterly basis. The operating profit margin improved by approximately 3 percentage points to 13%.

The platform business was the driving force behind the improved performance. Platform revenue rose 17% to 1.2303 trillion won. Revenue from TalkBiz, the company’s core business, increased 12% to 643.2 billion won, marking a return to double-digit growth for the first time in four years.

Advertising and subscription revenue rose 14% to 399.9 billion won. Business Messages grew 20%, driven by robust demand from financial advertisers and an expansion in marketing-oriented messaging, while KakaoTalk display ads increased 28% due to rising usage of feed-based services and the success of new products. Display ad revenue, excluding BizBoard, tripled year-over-year, and its share of total display ad revenue expanded to 45%.

In the commerce segment, the “self-purchase” strategy for the Gifting service proved successful. Consolidated commerce transaction volume for the second quarter rose 9% to 2.7 trillion won, while self-purchase transaction volume surged 39%. Self-purchases now account for approximately 20% of total Gifting transaction volume.

Revenue from “Other Platform” segments, which include Mobility and Pay, also rose by 22%. kakaopay recorded its highest-ever quarterly revenue and operating profit, driven by increased domestic and international stock trading and growth in payment and platform services. In contrast, content revenue grew by only 1%, highlighting a disparity in growth momentum compared to the platform segment.

The profit growth rate significantly outpaced the revenue growth rate, driven by the growth of high-margin core businesses combined with the effects of corporate restructuring and the divestment of non-core businesses. Kakao’s standalone operating profit margin also reached 18%, the highest level since the acquisition of Kakao Brain.

Shin Jong-hwan, Kakao’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO), commented, “The strong second-quarter performance is not a temporary peak but evidence that Kakao’s profit resilience has risen to a new level,” adding that it serves as “a new benchmark for evaluating future performance.” Kakao projected that, as the effects of divesting non-core businesses are fully reflected starting in the third quarter, it will exceed its annual targets of over 10% revenue growth and a 10% operating profit margin.

First Transaction Trial with Coupang Eats… AI Monetization Next Year

Kakao is channeling the profitability generated from its core business into investments in agentic AI. Growth in advertising and commerce has begun to offset the burden of AI investments, and the company plans to manage AI operating costs at current levels in the second half of the year.

The first area of external collaboration is food delivery. Kakao is preparing a service that integrates with Coupang Eats via an Agent-to-Agent (A2A) model to detect food ordering intent within KakaoTalk conversations, suggest menus tailored to user preferences, and allow users to complete orders and payments directly within the chat window.

The two companies are coordinating on authentication, ordering and payment, roles and responsibilities, and business models, and plan to launch the actual service as soon as possible. Kakao will first verify whether this collaboration generates actual orders and payments and leads to an influx of new customers and increased transaction volume for Coupang Eats before expanding its scope to commerce, reservations, travel, and payments.

Kakao aims to expand the monthly active users (MAU) of its AI services within KakaoTalk to 10 million by the end of this year and will begin full-scale monetization starting next year. The revenue model will consist of transaction fees from agent-based commerce, AI subscriptions, and new forms of AI advertising. In particular, based on users’ interests and purchase intentions identified during the AI exploration process, the company plans to expand its business scope to include the search advertising market—an area it has not yet fully entered. The company aims to increase the share of AI-related revenue within TalkBiz to a double-digit percentage by 2028.

Kakao has decided not to enter infrastructure businesses such as AI data centers and GPU cloud services in earnest, but to focus its capabilities on models and consumer services.

CEO Jeong Shin-ah explained, “We determined that the infrastructure layer is not the area where Kakao can build the strongest competitive edge in the AI era,” adding, “AI infrastructure businesses require massive upfront investment and continuous capital expenditure, and the generational turnover of GPUs and AI servers is extremely rapid.” She emphasized, “Rather than allocating significant capital to the infrastructure layer, where CAPEX itself is the essence of competitiveness, we will focus more on the model layer through the service layer to create AI services that all citizens use habitually in their daily lives.”

Starting with its first transaction integration with Coupang Eats in the second half of this year, Kakao plans to expand the scope of Agent-based AI applications across all aspects of daily life, establishing it as a new growth engine. To this end, the company will collaborate with partners in high-frequency usage areas such as commerce, reservations, travel, and payments, and actively leverage Kakao’s MCP-based open platform, “PlayMCP,” to rapidly expand its ecosystem.

CEO Jeong stated, “In the era of agentic AI, the key competitive advantage lies not in who can build the most advanced model, but in how naturally AI can be integrated into users’ daily lives and linked to their actual behaviors.” He added, “As a first mover leading the popularization of this technology, we will blaze a trail so that every citizen can have their own AI agent.”